


The Warmth of the Light of Faraway Stars

by raedbard



Category: The West Wing
Genre: BDSM, Banter, Bondage, Community: kink_bingo, F/M, Genital Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-28
Updated: 2010-08-28
Packaged: 2017-10-11 07:11:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/109813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raedbard/pseuds/raedbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes the best painkiller is the body next to yours. Or in Donna's case, the body in the office one bullpen over.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Warmth of the Light of Faraway Stars

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2010 round of kink_bingo @ DreamWidth. Kink in question is 'genital torture'.
> 
> Fic set somewhere in Season 5, post Will leaving to work for Bob Russell (and probably post-'No Exit'.)

"Aren't you gonna ...?" She wraps the robe tighter around her shoulders and flicks her eyes to his crotch, then back up to his face.

He shrugs. "I'll jerk off later."

"That's nice, Toby," she says, grimacing a little.

"What?"

"You've been mystique guy for the last two hours and now you've gone and wrecked the illusion. Gotta maintain your allure, you know? You could learn that from me."

He smiles his unfolding smile. She feels her cunt muscles contract involuntarily, and shifts, as discreetly as she can, sitting on the bed. Maybe it's a cliche and maybe he's the guy her mom warned her about when she was fourteen and guys first started giving her that exact look he's giving her now, but she what she knows right now is that if was holding her head above a bucket of ice water and smiled that smile at her she would let him half-drown her in the name of pleasure. His hands are gentle, even while they are treasure-seeking their own pleasure, and his eyes are still kind, still sad.

They've been doing this a little while now. She has an idea why but it's not an idea she'll trust to words, or to paper, or even as the basis of thoughts more complex than 'Sam left and he hates Will Bailey for going to work with Russell', or, 'this job is not all I'm good for', or, 'he just had another fight with the President', or, 'I'm still in love with Josh'. 

At first it was just pretending to run into each other at bars they both knew perfectly well the other one went to, occasionally, maybe when they felt a little like hiding, or a little like quitting. She would sit at the bar in a red dress and drink martini after martini until she felt the warmth of his hand rush against the cool of her elbow. At first they pretended not to know why they were there; then they pretended not to care; then they pretended not to know each other. Most of those evenings ended the same way: back at his place, getting fucked into his bed by every combination of negative emotion and sexual frustration in the book. She worried about it for a while, then gradually stopped feeling guilty for the way she loved how he touched her -- as though she was precious and worthless at the same time; in love with her pleasure as much as his own; unafraid of her body and, for a guy who always looked so incredibly uncomfortable in his own skin (while fully dressed at least), unafraid of the potential of his own. And if that easy abandon scared her a little, it wasn't like she was scared for herself: she was past that point then; she knew he was, too. It scared her to understand that this was the same man who made a point of holding her hand (quietly, and completely out of sight of everyone else, of course) when the doctor came in to tell them that they could see Josh now and that they should prepare themselves for the shock of the tubes and the monitors and what she was worried about was how self-conscious and undignified Josh would feel, bruised and in pain and dirty and drugged to the eyeballs wearing nothing but a backless hospital gown, and how she laughed until she started crying and then couldn't stop crying and then had to stop because she was afraid she was going to throw up. That evening he had stayed behind, and his silence was the best analgesic, that and his warm hands. So it's hard to understand how this guy, who seems to have endless fights left in him but only the desperate, impossible ones, is the same as that one. He looks the same, he has the same eyes, but she feels chaos raging in him; she has been caught up in its pattern, or else recognised a variation on her own.

So they fucked for a while, ad hoc and easy, and then one night, before they'd even really got started, he had hit her -- slapped her ass hard enough (he said; she checked it out in a mirror the next day, but the marks had faded by then) for the prints of his fingers to show up. She had felt her body opening up -- to friction, to dramatic, generous violence, and to pain, and how she sometimes couldn't tell pain from pleasure.

By the time his fingers made it between her legs her thighs were dripping with her own wetness and he had grinned, showing his teeth, and stroked the slick mess all over his index finger, then trailed it across her belly, pinched a nipple, finally pushed that finger between her lips. She bit it, and he smiled, then let his hand fall across her cheek in a way that stung like hell but could just as well have happened in slow motion. He was hard (half-dressed at the start, still in his pants but with sweat darkening the hair on his bare chest, the chain on which his wedding ring hangs glinting in the lamp light) all the time he played with sensation across her body. He was never cruel, but he was always relentless. She wondered, in odd seconds where time seemed to stretch like her skin beneath his hands, how she was going to take the next breath: everything heightened, everything about to collapse, only to rebuild itself again, higher and more precarious than before. That night she came as hard as she ever remembered before, and over and over, under his hands. And Toby, dripping sweat, looking like the high ceiling of a storm cloud, grey-black and heavy on her senses and her body, came silently, with a single flick of his wrist and his loose fingers over his cock, spattering semen all over her belly.

These days their sex is a little more esoteric, and sometimes she has to hide how sore she feels the next day, but she never has to hide any visible marks. She isn't sure that it's making either of them feel any better, except for those long seconds during which time stretches and her body seems to stretch with it, thinning out to a barely coherent assembly of nerve impulses and tight, raging pleasure. She gets lost; he helps her. She suspects she is trying to ditch her anchor: allow herself the possibility that one day she could walk away by showing her body that thirty seconds' vacation from her known universe is possible, desirable -- even getting damn near to addictive.

She doesn't know what Toby gets out of it, except the obvious lure of a female body and regularly getting laid if he wants it. She doesn't think he gets off on the dominance in particular, but it's hard to tell; it's _Toby_, and his smiles are harder to interpret than his grim silences, or the look he gets when he's holding an ice cube against her clit, just before he shoves it up inside her and waits for it to melt, drinking the resultant mixture down like scotch and water. Maybe, she thinks, it's just entropy: he longs for a great disaster, just doesn't know where he'd be standing when it came. Some nights Donna finds this comforting; some nights she wants to comfort him.

Tonight is one of the better nights. He tied her up and kissed her wrists. He spread her legs wide over the bed and looped a silk tie around each of her ankles and pulled them tight against the southern legs of the bed. She thinks he likes the part where he ties her up the best out of everything. Her thigh muscles sang a high chord that could have been pain or extremely pure desire. He smiled. He even laughed. He pushed her thighs into the bed with the palms of his hands, then stroked the skin pink, stroked flat -- it seemed to her -- every invisible hair. He spent half an hour with his head between her legs. He pulled out into smoothness every fold. He shoved a pillow under hips and dripped on her from high above his own head drops of (dilute) peppermint oil, then rubbed it in with his thumb, the friction first only warm like sunshine through a window then, as the atoms excite, as his smirk expanded, as her flesh started to understand, the heat exploded. Another drop. Another. Something burned through her, and then his fingers took it away, with a damp washcloth and the gentle pull of his thumbs. Her thighs strained to let him spread her legs even wider. He used the back of his hand first to rub gently and then slap hard. He licked the peppermint from her and when she looked up from the pillow his lips and teeth flickered slickly, wolfish. And then he lay on top of her, his whole weight, his belt buckle digging into her belly and the knot of his necktie into her throat, and kissed her. His mouth like a rock candy fist. She laughed, then realised she couldn't get back any of the oxygen she had just expelled. He smirked again, and his hand went between her legs; another fist, his fingers grabbing her cunt, the hair, the flesh, his fingers wet and clumsy, hauling her upwards from the lips, folds caught between his nails, and everything suddenly circling this pain, starting to be swallowed, starting to go down. He let go, abruptly. Kissed her again, supporting his weight on his elbows. His kissed her mouth, he kissed her eyes as she closed them in surprise. He sat up and looked at her and she did not understand the sudden expulsion of light from his face. He was extinguished, for a second. He was thinking of someone else. He licked up the mess from her. He beat a brief arrhythmical tattoo across her belly. He struck her clit. He sucked her, whole, it seemed, into himself. The warmth of his mouth was all that existed, for a few seconds. He made her come. They don't have to talk about it. About _why_.

And now she can school him on allure. This, Donna thinks, really could be a lot worse.

Toby is standing with his hands on his hips by the bed. His oh-you-think-you-know-better-do-you-really? pose. She tries to wrestle the smile off her face. He raises an eyebrow at her.

"I could learn allure from you, huh? This doesn't, I can only pray, involve expensive lingerie and strapless dresses."

"Are you implying that I have no allure beyond those things, Toby?"

"Of course not, not at all," he says, eyes glinting.

"All right, fine. I won't share the secrets with you."

He holds up his hands. "Just that your own very charming brand of allure is of a decidedly feminine nature that my own clumsy masculinity can't possibly assimilate."

"So, you'd rather just watch, is what you're saying. I think."

He laughs, again. Twice in a night, she thinks -- gotta be some kind of record. It's an odd, gulping bark of sound, exposing wet tongue and sharp-looking teeth until both are covered by the back of his hand, but it produces a more intense version of the same sensation his smile made in her. She doesn't get to see him laugh often enough, these days.

"Something like that." He sits beside her. He winces a little, then clears his throat to cover. His discomfort is down to his dick being so hard it's difficult to sit comfortably. She frowns at him in the way of harassed administrative staff everywhere: _if you just let me sort the problem out we can both get on with our lives more easily_. She slips one hand over his thigh but he shifts, and pulls away.

"Later."

"You're going to sleep like that?"

"Well, probably not _sleep_ ... "

"Toby!"

"Not tonight, Donna."

"Okay. Explode or cramp or whatever it is that happens to you people. Just don't send me running out into the rain for the AMA's best surgeons when it happens."

He stares at her; she stares right back, since his stare doesn't intimidate her unless they both have clothes on these days.

"I'll be sure to remember not to do that," he says. "And also maybe to sign you up for a biology class," he adds, not quite under his breath.

"I took biology, Toby. I was top ten percentile in biology, for your information."

He rolls his eyes, then gets up.

"Where're you going?"

"To the bathroom, to jerk off. Since you seem to think that dire consequences will ensue if I neglect to do so."

"I can't ... you're really impossible, you know that?"

"I've been told before."

"What are you ... what? My hand isn't ... good enough?"

He smirks. "No. Your hands are fine."

"Because, if it's -- "

"I'd just rather, ah, take this one myself."

"It's just, you know ... "

"What?"

"A little _weird_, knowing you're in there, and I'm out here ... listening, and -- "

"Weirder than me tying you up with my second-best silk tie?"

"Yes!"

"Why?"

"Because then we're both in the same room, on the same bed, fucking _each other_. Don't you think that?"

He looks at her. His hand twists the door handle down and open. He shakes his head. "No," he says.

Later, after he's back and they've managed coffee and shop talk about whatever crisis it is they're not supposed to be talking about (she forgets what they say almost as the words leave their mouths), they lie on the bed and don't talk about it. This is the quiet part; this is the part that the two per cent of her brain that still thinks this is a really bad idea uses to reassure itself that they are not, in fact, turning into the kind of people her Wisconsin parents would shun.

She lies in his arms. He has put his shirt back on. It is the light green one, which he hardly ever wears anymore. She doesn't know when she started keeping track, only that she now knows Toby's schedule for which days of the week go with which shirt as well as she does Josh's, and that the green shirt makes him look handsome, and that, as she lies there with his arms loose around her waist, stroking the dark hair over his wrists, and, closer even than the smell of peppermint, she can smell the oil he uses to slick back his hair, and that the scent is a comforting one. Even entropy has its still moments. They fall asleep there. They do not meet like this again.


End file.
